This dissertation draws on feminist theory – specifically, performance and performativity – to explore how digital game players construct the game experience and social play. Scholarship in game studies has established the formal aspects of a game as being a combination of its rules and the fiction or narrative that contextualizes those rules. The question remains, how do the ways people play games influence what makes up a game, and how those players understand themselves as players and as social actors through the gaming experience?
Taking a qualitative approach, this study explored players of fighting games: competitive games of one-on-one combat. Specifically, it combined observations at the Evolution fighting game tournament in July, 2009 and in-depth interviews with fighting game enthusiasts. In addition, three groups of college students with varying histories and experiences with games were observed playing both competitive and cooperative games together. The themes and experiences identified at these sites fell into three broad areas: the environment in which games are played, normative ideas about how those games are played, and the ways in which gamers play socially.
Beyond the actual computer code of the game, and its story, the play experiences of the gamers in this study involved socializing and exchanging play information via online forums, attendance at social events focused on play, and the creation and maintenance of a very specific way of playing. These paratextual elements extend from social activities to specific, preferred technological interfaces for gameplay. This research argues that a game is defined as much by the ways it is played as by the formal aspects that make it up. Future research is needed to identify if these behaviors are limited to fighting game players or exhibited in other gaming communities, as well as to continue to explore the intersectional construction of identity inside those gaming communities.